AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Siobhan Gorman

August 23, 2005
The director of national intelligence is the president's primary intelligence adviser, responsible for coordinating the activities of the 15 U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and intelligence activities within other departments and military offices. The CIA correlates, ...

June 17, 2005
The Port of Los Angeles -- Twelve thousand times a day, the hulking cranes outside Noel Cunningham's office unload another shipping container. Any one of them could conceal a nuclear weapon -- and Cunningham's first clue, he fears, might be a blinding flash outside his window. As director of operations ...

June 10, 2005
Back in 1987, as President Reagan's undersecretary of Defense for policy, Fred Ikle worked on what he felt was a groundbreaking Defense Science Board report that highlighted the need to improve nuclear-detection technology. Nothing happened. In 2004, he worked on another Defense Science Board report that highlighted the need to ...

May 9, 2005
On the job for just two weeks, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte is already asserting his authority: In a classified memo, he has directed CIA station chiefs around the world to represent him and to report directly to him on many intelligence matters. "It has a lot of far-reaching ...

April 29, 2005
Call it Total Information Awareness, homeland-style. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff this week floated an idea to start a nonprofit group that would collect information on private citizens, flag suspicious activity, and send names of suspicious people to his department. The idea, which Chertoff tossed out at an April 27 ...

March 18, 2005
Five days after telling Congress that the emperor had had no weapons of mass destruction, David Kay, who had recently stepped down as the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, found himself lunching just off the Oval Office with President Bush. Kay's declaration -- "We were almost all wrong" in ...

February 18, 2005
Around 9 a.m. on January 19, an agent from the FBI's Boston office was called out of a meeting that was planning for an upcoming local terrorism-response exercise. When he returned to the meeting, according to one person familiar with the event, the agent described in "heavy detail" an uncorroborated ...

February 4, 2005
In grappling with its new national security challenges, the U.S. government has developed a fetish for reorganization. The Bush administration's post-9/11 obsession with making the United States less vulnerable to terrorists has so far led to creation of the White House Office of Homeland Security, the Department of Homeland Security, ...

January 21, 2005
Looking to tame a young department that the White House sees as an unruly teenager, President Bush has tapped 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Michael Chertoff to be the stern father at the Homeland Security Department. But if he's confirmed as secretary, Chertoff's disciplinary options will be limited, unless ...

November 24, 2004
It's a textbook case of what no incoming CEO should do: Recruit your friends from outside for top management posts, hole up in your office for the first weeks of your tenure, distance yourself from key management decisions, and restrict communications with employees to impersonal e-mails. Yet that's been Porter ...